With the recent trend of highly integrated and high-performance semiconductor device, improvement in productivity of manufacturing the semiconductor is very essential to realize cost reduction. As for a method for improving the productivity, increasing a diameter of a semiconductor substrate may be enumerated. Conventionally, a 200 mm substrate has been used as a semiconductor substrate (wafer), but, now, a 300 mm substrate is mainly used. If a semiconductor device is fabricated by using a 300 mm substrate of a large diameter, the number of semiconductor devices, which can be produced by using one sheet of substrate, is increased, thereby improving the productivity.
In case of using a 300 mm substrate, the conventional semiconductor device for processing a 200 mm substrate should be replaced with a device capable of processing a 300 mm substrate. In this case, a substrate supporting structure for supporting the substrate becomes scaled up, so that the semiconductor processing device such as plasma processing device or the like has to be also large-scaled. Thus, the footprint of the semiconductor processing device is increased, and the number of devices, which can be disposed in a semiconductor production factory, is accordingly decreased to thereby lower the productivity of the semiconductor device. Further, if components for a 200 mm substrate are scaled up to be used for a 300 mm substrate while employing the conventional substrate supporting structure as it is, a substantial cost increase is incurred.